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SCAM LIKELY: Scam Calls, Data Brokers & the Machines Behind Them
Description
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Become a Bunker Dweller
24 SCAM LIKELY
NATIONAL DAY: National Just Because Day — A day to do something kind or fun for no particular reason.
BIRTHDAY: Aaron Paul (born 1979) — Actor best known for Breaking Bad.
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: 2003 — Mars made its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years.
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SCAM LIKELY (FTC / Consumer Protection)
Your phone used to ring because somebody had your number. Now a scammer can arrive with your number, your relatives, your habits — and maybe a cloned voice that sounds like somebody you love.
• AI voice cloning can turn short public audio clips into convincing impersonations.
• Caller-ID spoofing and cheap internet calling make mass scam attempts easy to launch and hard to trace.
• FTC: consumers reported $3.5 billion lost to imposter scams in 2025.
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THE NEW PHONE BOOK’S HERE! (FTC / Data Brokers)
The old phone book gave strangers a name, address and number. The modern version can assemble far more — public records, online activity, relatives, location information and commercially collected data.
• People-search sites are data brokers: they compile information from public records, public profiles and other brokers, then sell or share reports.
• The FTC has pursued cases involving sensitive location data and has warned brokers about restrictions on transferring sensitive American data to foreign adversaries.
• The punchline: an industry profits from collecting the data, while another industry sells us blocking, monitoring, removal and identity-protection services.
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THE CLOUD HAS A POWER BILL (U.S. Department of Energy)
The scammer is not sitting inside a data center — but the digital economy that makes massive-scale data collection, AI, automation and cloud computing possible lives on physical infrastructure.
• AI growth is one driver of rapidly rising data-center electricity demand.
• DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scenarios estimate data centers could account for roughly 9.5%–15.3% of U.S. electricity use by 2030.
• The Road Rage question: we eliminated the phone book, automated the middleman, monetized the information — and now we need enormous buildings and enormous amounts of electricity to keep the digital machine running.
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SHOW CREDITS:
Thank you to my co-host, Ken Madden of MaddK Studio
Jason Radosevich Horrible Designs
Cast:
Kate the Duchess of NJ and John Jamingo of theBoomer Bunker
Aaron of I had to Say it
Boomer Bob of the Boomer Bob Show
Supporters:
Steve McShane of the Razor Wire News
Josh Roberts from New Hampshi